BOOK
Galen Rowell: A Retrospective
(Sierra Club Books)
After seeing that umpteenth shot of Half Dome bathed in celestial light, you could be forgiven for dismissing nature photography as all cliché and too-easy beauty. This career-spanning look at Galen Rowell’s work should change your mind. Rowell, the Berkeley photographer, writer, climber, and conservationist who died in a plane crash in 2002, packed his rig across deserts and up mountains in search of the sublime. As these lush, super­saturated images testify, he often found it. A photo from Central Asia’s Pamir Range, for example, shows two horsemen, impossibly small beneath a bone-colored, frame-filling sand dune, traversing a thin strip of grass. Rowell used light with unmatched skill, taking from the sky what most photographers would need a battery of studio equipment to achieve; an image from the High Sierra is a study in contrasts, the snowy foreground wrapped in shadow, below a peak so golden it almost makes you squint. There’s a shot of Half Dome here, too: a rock climber reaching for his next hold as the valley spills out behind him. In Rowell’s hands, it’s not at all clichéd. A
CHRIS SMITH

CD
DJ Shadow: The Outsider
(Universal)
In the past, it seemed wrong to call DJ Shadow (aka Josh Davis) a hip-hop artist. Sure, the Mill Valley–based producer built his tunes from obscure soul and funk samples and prayed at the altar of the drum break. But his songs were more likely to serve as the sound track to a freaky documentary (2000’s Dark Days) than to anyone’s block party. So it’s a rather welcome shock when the first half of his third official album comes shooting out of the speakers like Tom Cruise after a shrink. Shadow really lets loose for the first time, giving the soulful “This Time (I’m Gonna Do It My Way)” a fluid, Latin-soul framework and fueling the instrumental “Artifact” with machine-gun drum beats. Tracks like “3 Freaks” and “Dats My Part” are supercharged with raucous beats and crazed synth work, pushed skyward by hyped-up verses by guests like Keak da Sneak and E-40. Side two is a bit heavy on ethereal soundscapes and hippie-dippy lyrics but has a couple of choice nuggets. With its bouncy, addictive beat and fluid verbiage from A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip and Quannum’s Lateef tha Truth Speaker, the penultimate track, “Enuff,” is as club-worthy as anything the DJ has done. After spending much of his career proving what hip-hop isn’t, Shadow has finally made a record celebrating what it is. A-
DAN STRACHOTA

BOOK
Steven Levy: The Perfect Thing
(Simon & Schuster)
I love my iPod, and you love your iPod—but Newsweek chief technology writer Steven Levy really loves his iPod. In a book timed to coincide with the iPod’s fifth birthday, Levy celebrates the gadget’s sleekness, elusive It factor, and especially the glorious adventure of its Shuffle component. In fact, the book (subtitled How iPod Is Shuffling Commerce, Culture, and Coolness) is itself set on Shuffle: the chapters in each copy are assembled in random order. It may seem like a gimmick, but Levy is making a point here, about how Steve Jobs’s pocket-size
miracle has brought about a revolution in consciousness. It’s not just about music, it’s also about how having access to a vast and constant personal sound track affects how we think, interact, move through public space—it’s a whole new world, baby, and Levy’s here to tell us what it sounds like. For better or worse, though, Levy is a technophile, and his book is not so much a considered history of technological innovation as a giddy love song to the aesthetic, commercial, and practical triumph of Apple’s biggest-selling product. Like all love songs, its object may not be worthy of such all-consuming passion. If you think of your iPod as merely a convenient, compact way to store your music, or you don’t even have one, you may want to hit “Skip.” B-
SHEERLY AVNI

BLOG
Restaurant Girl Speaks
An anonymous veteran waitress and freelance journalist offers readers “an inside slice of restaurant life” with her lively blog at RestaurantGirlSpeaks.blogspot.com, a mix of gossipy accounts of restaurant drama; philosophical musings on her life as a waitress; and detailed, food-snobbish reviews of local restaurants. Anyone who’s ever worked in the restaurant business will chuckle knowingly at her insights, but even if you haven’t spent any time as a server or host, you’ll enjoy her confessional, perky prose. The site perfectly conveys the ups and downs of work in the food-service industry, bemoaning the stinginess of a transvestite Barbara Walters look-alike one day, rejoicing that her new hairdo got her some extra-good tips the next. One post mischievously describes a particularly slow and unlucrative evening that she and a co-worker spent sneaking across the street to a dive bar to pound drinks. Restaurant Girl never names the places she’s worked, so part of the fun is guessing which restaurants she’s writing about. So far I’ve gleaned that what she calls “The Bistro” is a little place somewhere in Pacific Heights and that “The Restaurant” is near Market and Church. As she posts more, maybe we can figure out exactly which places she’s giving us the dish on. A
BYRON PERRY

BOOK
Michael Lewis: The Best American Sports Writing 2006
(Houghton Mifflin)
The Berkeley-based author of best-selling books and breezy-smart magazine articles remarks in his introduction that the writer of one piece—about cheerleading in Texas—“takes on a far bigger subject than she pretends.” That’s Michael Lewis’s own style in a nutshell, and explains why his picks for the 27 finest examples of recent sportswriting excel at telling the moving or just plain cool story within the story. Lewis himself hit sporting gold with 2003’s Moneyball, which turned the story of the Oakland A’s into a gripping tale about generational conflict, and the pieces here also tend to look deeper: Greg Garber’s ESPN.com piece on deceased football great Mike Webster is really about brain damage; Steve Friedman’s story about learning to play golf in his 40s is really about fathers; Pamela Colloff’s look at a fired lesbian coach in Texas Monthly is a case study of small-town politics. Lewis argues that many of these writers have “serious literary ability,” and at least a few—Paul Solotaroff, Sports Illustrated great Gary Smith (check out his collection Beyond the Game)—do merit that claim. More credibly, Lewis—whose other new book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, is on football—says that this collection left him “feeling a little bit better about the world around me.” If you love sports, you’ll find that response as accurate as a Roger Clemens fastball. B
BRUCE KELLEY